There are 300 million planets that could support life: NASA
Man Creates Bird Feeder That Trains Magpies To Exchange Trash For Treats The Animal Rescue Site News ( Marg and Gough).
Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose (New Yorker Nov 2, 2020)
The President has survived one impeachment, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if Joe Biden wins.
Wall Street Journal Tax Report, The IRS Reels in a Whale of an Offshore Tax Cheat—and Goes for Another:
U.S. tax officials have thrown a historic one-two punch at wealthy Americans hiding money offshore.
On Oct. 15, they announced that Robert Smith, the 57-year-old private-equity billionaire who founded Vista Equity Partners, admitted he criminally evaded taxes on more than $200 million of income from 2000 through 2015 by using secret foreign accounts in the Caribbean and Switzerland. Mr. Smith, who is famous for announcing at Morehouse College’s graduation that he would pay off student loans for the class of 2019, will pay $139 million to the Internal Revenue Service in taxes and penalties. He will also forgo claims to $182 million in deductions for charitable donations, which could add more than $65 million to what he owes the IRS. But he won’t be prosecuted.
Mike Dignetti (Penn State), The Jock Tax: How the National Football League Can Level the Playing Field:
There are thirty-two NFL teams located across twenty-three different states. State and local tax rates assessed in the different locations range from 0% to 13.3%. NFL teams play at least sixteen games every year, eight of which are played at opposing team’s locations. Due to this, NFL players can be required to file upwards of nine different state and local tax returns per season.
“What it all comes to is the purposeless of everything, life, the universe, even the number 42” — Alex Rosenberg (Duke) begins an exchange of letters with Daniel Dennett (Tufts).
Feminism contributes to the demand for and development of sex robots, the increase of which will end up being bad for women — this and other speculations about sex robots from evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman (Portsmouth) (via MR
The hidden pleasures of intellectual life — Zena Hitz (St. Johns) in conversation with Robert Talisse
A new blog series on meaning — edited by Steven DeLay (Woolf), at 3:16 AM
“I think that philosophers would do well to have a more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance” — an interview with Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
The John Stuart Mill Cup is a tournament in which teams of high school students in the UK match wits with each other discussing ethical issues of public concern — organizer Ben Sachs (St. Andrews) is looking to expand its reach; contact him for details
Do you find yourself “wobbling and toggling between perspectives, being unable to relax into a single framework to make sense of things”? — that might be “zozobra,” as Francisco Gallegos (Wake Forest) & Carlos Alberto Sánchez (San José State) explain
Paralysis by analysis: Extravagance clots Michael Pezzullo’s security sermon (Canberra Times, Nov 3)
Pezzullo’s 2020 list tries to cover everything, a serious failure. As pointed out by US scholars, if policy makers try to address all imaginable threats, security will paralyse government.Continue reading
